Theoretical Framework
“How can I create opportunities in my social science classroom for learners to engage with social science and historical material and build historical connections rather than memorize content?”
My Experience as a Student
I attended Shadow Mountain High School in Phoenix, Arizona in the 1980s. Shadow Mountain was located in a middle- to upper-middle, primarily white, suburban neighborhood. My experience with teachers and the acquisition of the content they taught varied based on my interest levels. In classes where we completed projects, participated in experiential learning activities, and I created a relationship with the subject matter, I excelled and was enrolled in advanced (GATE, Gifted and Talented Education) …show more content…
I took over three college-prep U.S. History classes, one English as a Second Language (ESL) U.S. History class, and team-taught an Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. History class. When I joined the AP U.S. History class, the course was essentially finished because the AP test had been taken, and students were working on final projects. The college-prep and ESL classes , on the other hand, had decades of content to cover from post World War II to the 1960s in the college-prep classes, and early 1900s to World War II in the ESL …show more content…
As an educator, I have faced an ongoing struggle to find ways to engage students and help them build meaningful historical connections in the face of limited time, broad content standards, and high-stakes testing. Finding a balance between teaching skill-based, analytical thinking and written and oral communication skills and teaching standards-based content, and knowing when instruction needs to be teacher-centered and when it needs to student-centered has been an ongoing challenge. Frequently, my students have come to class seeing history as a laundry list of dates and places to be filed away until asked to identify the correct answer on a test. In some cases, this is the task that students have been asked to perform. However, the more interesting and far more difficult task lies in teaching students how to apply knowledge to understand broader historical, social, and economic concepts that drive the human
“How can I create opportunities in my social science classroom for learners to engage with social science and historical material and build historical connections rather than memorize content?”
My Experience as a Student
I attended Shadow Mountain High School in Phoenix, Arizona in the 1980s. Shadow Mountain was located in a middle- to upper-middle, primarily white, suburban neighborhood. My experience with teachers and the acquisition of the content they taught varied based on my interest levels. In classes where we completed projects, participated in experiential learning activities, and I created a relationship with the subject matter, I excelled and was enrolled in advanced (GATE, Gifted and Talented Education) …show more content…
I took over three college-prep U.S. History classes, one English as a Second Language (ESL) U.S. History class, and team-taught an Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. History class. When I joined the AP U.S. History class, the course was essentially finished because the AP test had been taken, and students were working on final projects. The college-prep and ESL classes , on the other hand, had decades of content to cover from post World War II to the 1960s in the college-prep classes, and early 1900s to World War II in the ESL …show more content…
As an educator, I have faced an ongoing struggle to find ways to engage students and help them build meaningful historical connections in the face of limited time, broad content standards, and high-stakes testing. Finding a balance between teaching skill-based, analytical thinking and written and oral communication skills and teaching standards-based content, and knowing when instruction needs to be teacher-centered and when it needs to student-centered has been an ongoing challenge. Frequently, my students have come to class seeing history as a laundry list of dates and places to be filed away until asked to identify the correct answer on a test. In some cases, this is the task that students have been asked to perform. However, the more interesting and far more difficult task lies in teaching students how to apply knowledge to understand broader historical, social, and economic concepts that drive the human